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 | This user has been on Wikipedia for 15 years, 6 months and 18 days. |
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About me
I'm a 20-something programmer living in Manhattan. I edited erratically for five years or so as an IP user before finally registering this account and began actively editing in May 2009. A month after that, I installed Twinkle to help fight vandalism on my small watchlist as well as any pages I visited out of curiosity. Four months later I discovered the recent changes page and started fighting vandalism on random pages, and my watchlist expanded drastically. I picked up Rollback with the intention of installing Huggle, but I'm a procrastinator and haven't gotten around to it (I intend to upgrade my home computer to Win7, so I justify doing nothing on that basis).
Editing Philosophy
I tend to assume good faith (AGF) a bit more readily than most in discussions. I find that being reasonable, even with unreasonable or angry people, tends to lead to them calming down. Eventually you can actually come to an agreement, which is vastly preferable to edit wars.
I take a similar stance to vandalism (where no discussion yet exists), usually choosing to begin warning at level 1 (AGF) or level 2 (no assumption made), even for what I suspect was intentional vandalism. There are two exceptions to this rule. Hate speech, including slurs related to ethnicity, religion or sexuality, almost always earn a level 3 warning to start. Particularly vitriolic personal attacks (as opposed to simple failure to AGF) directed at any specific person (editors or otherwise) earn a level 3 or 4 warning, depending on circumstances.
My one point of contention right now relates to the Wikipedia policies for article or content deletion. I generally find that deletion discussions err a little too far on the side of Keep. I recognize that wikipedia is not paper, but I also feel that Wikipedia should aspire to encyclopedic quality of content. An example:
Both of these articles, Vampire folklore by region and Comparison of vampire traits are attempting a similar task. The former, while lengthy and a tad undersourced, is a decent scholarly treatment comparing various vampire legends. The latter is a bunch of tables comparing ancient folktales (from a variety of sources) to classic novels to advertising to muppets to cartoons to adult TV shows to tween pop lit to video games to pencil and paper RPGs. The detail is so minimal (essentially check boxes with occasional 1-5 word comments) that significant differences are hidden. The tables are so large that even if the information was useful, it would be nigh unto impossible to actually keep it all in mind to fully compare two vampires, let alone more.
Yet attempts to delete the latter article, or even remove the useless tables and try and turn it into a useful description of the evolution of vampires through history are blocked by the lack of consensus. By defining consensus as near unanimous agreement, it's too hard for articles with a sufficient number of subject fans to ever be deleted or cleaned up. By deciding that WP:ITSCRUFT is an invalid argument for deletion (a good rule in general I'll admit), egregiously useless pages cling to life.
That said, I'm not sure what a better solution would be. A voting system is equally prone to being overwhelmed by fanboys voting against disinterested (and I mean that both in the technical and vernacular sense of the word) editors. I realize that the existence of bad articles does not prevent the existence of good articles, but by dragging down the overall quality of Wikipedia, it makes it harder for anyone to trust or accept anything they read, and it makes us an object of mockery (Comparison of vampire traits was recently linked from reddit to amusement from all concerned).
If anyone has any comments on this, please, feel free to drop me a line on my talk page.
Favorite edit that I nevertheless reverted
I literally laughed out loud on reading this, but sadly, due to the flagrant violation of WP:OR and WP:BLP, I had to revert it.
Articles created
- Community Rights Council - Stub, mostly because I was annoyed by the lack of info on it while reading through Gonzales v. Raich
- Free space bitmap - Created to explain a computer science concept that I understood (at least a little) that was repeatedly referenced in other articles but totally unexplained (and therefore incomprehensible to non-CS types).
- Youth incarceration in the United States - Spun off from Incarceration in the United States. The section in the original article was nearly as long as the rest of the article put together. It was going off on such a tangent that it was nearly impossible to remember the original topic once the section ended and you were back to the original, non-youth oriented material. In addition, while the article was fairly balanced outside of that section, the section was so heavily weighted in the anti-incarceration direction that it made the whole article appear to be a point of view violation. Oddly, on its own it seems more balanced (still bad, but not as bad), if only because it doesn't seem to be trying to sway a broader argument regarding incarceration as a whole by focusing on a particularly egregious example of the problem.
Barnstars
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The Anti-Vandalism Barnstar
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| For keeping watch over the Mickey Mouse article you convinced me to unprotected =) –xenotalk 22:40, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
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